Technology

I've been seeing a lot of "passive income" b.s. coming from YouTube. They're tutorials, or at least shorts that point you at tutorials on how to build a site that effectively scrapes the web for news about a topic and uses LLMs to essentially rewrite articles about a topic in a new style.

It's just automated journalistic copying. Not new, but now done entirely by machines. In the past, news stations would regurgitate content from eachother all the time, especially for fluff pieces. This is just that, but without any actual people involved. Some of these tutorials claim to be able to produce upwards of a thousand dollars a month in passive income per site, or something like that.... Usually the person describing the scheme confesses that they have dozens of these sites running and no longer need to actually work.

It's the digital version of being a landlord. You squat the domain, steal the content, serve it up to unsuspecting people, and rake in the profits.... All without lifting a finger, or doing anything that actually helps anyone.

We all knew this was happening, people are getting upset about it because the news media did it first, and now these folks are taking their jobs!

How dare they.

I briefly considered it, but I don't want to contribute to the downfall of the internet as something that's useful.... So I'm not going to be doing this. It did give me a good idea to essentially replace myself with an AI at my workplace, I'd just be doing the actual work but for any communication, I'd just plug in the original email and a few keywords about the solution, let the AI do the typing, then just review/edit the response and send. It would save me hours of time daily...

Keep the Reddit-slamming to appropriate fo--- wait. This is about OTHER junk websites with AI-generated text. Carry on.

It's been this way for ages, though it was mechanical Turk created text and stolen content.

I don't really mind adverts, like when I see a creator I like doing a raid shadow legends bit I'm happy to see that they're making money from a shitty game rather than me having to pay.

And I know the established wisdom is that they track everything you do and say but honestly half my adverts are for things that make no sense to me like tampons and investment services, I really think them saying how well they know the user is just to get a advertiser money and isn't really as true as we fear. Not that I think it's a good thing but it's so trivial compared to everything else happening in the world Iv don't really care

I haven't played assassins creed odessey in quite a while and I googled how to get olive wood in the game quickly.

The first 3 sites were filled with garbage AI generated tips. Like it looked passable at first glance but only 1 of the 5 tips were even possible. They suggested I use an axe to cut down trees which isn't possible in the game at all. There was also a lot of repeating of the search phrase.

I like this